When I met my wife two things came apparent very quickly:
- She was more logical than most women. And I had my share of girls complaining about me wanting to take a walk in the park that they immediately transformed into some weird plot of me wanting to cheat on them. She wasn't like that, I could have a normal conversation based on arguments and she would get it. Wonderful.
- And second, she had this condition where she would have to take birth control pills otherwise her period would be all messed up. So, in short, she would either be on birth control or she would not ovulate. Heaven on Earth.
I was feeling like I struck gold. A normal human being that is incapable of having children. Pinch me (or punch me) cause I must be dreaming. Of course one of her conditioning to begin this beautiful relationship was that at some point she would want children. Sure, sure, I said and thought: If you can ever do that. On the other hand one part of me always knew that at some point this would have to happen, me having children - even if it felt like committing a felony.
The thing about me is that I never dealt with children. I didin't have a younger brother or sister and besides a small amount of days I had to deal with a two or three year old for a couple of hours (which actually turned out to be fun), I never had to interact with them. My knowledge about them was zero and my interestes dealt with anything but human beings, especially young humans. So I felt like I wasn't the right kind of material to be a parent and thought that if I were in a normal society then I would surely have a score low enough to not be in the part of the spectrum.
But I was wrong in all these accounts.
The planning
During one of our times we were living abroad, in some abysmall conditions I might add, my wife put her foot in the door and said it's time for her to have a baby. We were already knowing eachother for a long time and we've been already married for some years. She threatenend me with this before but this time she was really adamant about it. She tried different approaches, first being that she is getting older, of course. Like I care. But for women, like I already wrote, they do live with this timer above their head (or inside their uterus) that if they don't reproduce by their thirtyth birthday, they are going to fail their call of being a mother. Again, I didn't care about her age condition, for me having children was always a decision to make when you are stable. Financially, socially, career-wise, everything but age.
Then she came up with another stupid argument: she'll stay at home and be paid for two years. Two years! Can you image? she was emphasizing. She would stay with the little bundle of joy, not having to go to work for two whole years! What could be better than that? I started to feel even more repulsed. And I also wanted to hear what else she had to say. The thing is I was waiting for her to say something like she loves children or some sad story about some doll or pet she had in her childhood that she cared about and that she wants to feel something like again. But nothing like that was in her repertoire. The best thing she could say is that, if it were to be girl, when she'll grow up the two of them could go out drinking together. Beautiful! I thought.
The reality of our situation was pretty grim. We had nobody. My parents stated many years ago they don't want to deal with babies whatsoever and I knew her family: one broken grandmother plus one mother who had cancer. If anything, the kids would be her family, not our own. Also she wasn't really having a career, she didn't actually start working and what she was doing right now was just a temporary thing. But then again she hated what she was working so in her mind having children was a great escape plan out of that.
Now, when you are a married woman and you come out with this kind of proposal you don't really leave a lot of negociation room. For the man it's either acceptance or getting divorced, and I saw a lot of relationships end exactly like that with the woman getting in a new one and getting pregnant in about three months. There really isn't a way of saying "No" to such a request and the woman accepting it like she won't have a cocktail, since this was a theme thrown around the room back then, or something similar is unheard of. Honey, I want to have kids!; No; Ok, sure, no problem, let's go watch TV! Yes, no chance. So I had to accept and say that we'll try. In the back of my head I was still hoping her apparatus was broken as always and maybe my swimmer count had also dove towards negative values. In the end I was getting old as well.
The conception
After getting back home, my wife didn't need a lot of time to start the procedure. She halted her birth control pill intake and soon her period was nowhere to be found, the exact response that made me love her so much. No matter, she found a doctor in a heartbeat and we were in her cabinet soon after. Of course, she was a lady gynochologist so the two of them were radiating positive, baby-making energies all through the session. She was reassuring her she had many other women with her condition and just with some pill (fuck you, medicine) she would be able to ovulate like a... Well, normal person, in no time and all through her discourse she would look at her and at me with a smilling, reassuring face, all while I was looking at her with a "Shut the fuck up, you're destroying us both" face in response. She didn't get it, she wasn't caring, she didn't know our situation. In any case, my wife took the pills with one short swoosh of her hand and took maybe ten of them all at once.
What followed was the worst kind of sex I could experience. Even horses and pigs that are electrically stimulated have more dignity in the procedure than what a woman is capable when she wants to reproduce. It wasn't love, it wasn't sex, it was a programmed extraction. She would bang the door on the wall after coming from work and say something on the line of "I'm ovulating" and it didn't matter what I was doing. She would jump on me and moving like a drug-addict in search of his next dose, she would keep asking "Are you done? Did you finish?". If I would ever experience rape, than this would be it. But it wouldn't matter, we were married, she wanted a kid and in the end who cares about what the man thinks?
I was feeling bad. I was feeling bad for me, but I was also feeling bad for her. She would end up doing all sorts of fertility treatments that would fail and that could only make her more fierce and more upset. In the end I didn't want anyone to be sad, the thing I was worried about (and after a few years, rightfully so) was that we aren't the couple that can support kids and certainly I didn't want to add another person in this unstable world, especially in a difficult to run family.
But all my wishful wishes came crashing down one pregnancy test later that confirmed the little miracle. She indeed got pregnant. Her condition was just a simple cold in the grand scheme of things (and with modern medicine) and my sperm was as active as ever, may them be forever cursed. To put it bluntly my fear of getting women pregnant has been well placed. Women do get pregnant easily and life always finds a way.
The pregnancy
I never understood and will never understand how can women want to get pregnant. I always thought about pregnancy as something that happens on accident, something that nobody really wants to do on purpose. Yes, we are married, yes, we want kids, but we sure do everything in our power to keep it from happening. In the end no birth control method is 100% safe so in ten - twenty years you might just get a couple of actual miracles. And it has a certain prophetic sound to it, those kids are really meant to exist. And, besides, it would give the couple the chance to have a lot of sex to make those odds happen. Well, at least that was my impression.
Now, our pregnancy started pretty well. She wasn't morning sick or anything like that. More than anything she started sleeping better, something that my wife couldn't really do well on her own. But now she was warm and when it was about 8 o'clock she would get sleepy and fall asleep next to me. Those days were pretty decent even by my standards. We would watch some movie, have some hot chocolate, stay under the blanket on the sofa with our cat dozing next to us and, all in all, be in a calm environment. She was getting her cupcake and I was trying to experience this serenity as much as I could before the actual disaster that will follow.
On the other hand I was busy looking for a house where to stay. My wife wasn't caring about this whatsoever, she was under her hormonal cocktail so that fact that we were living in a small apartment wasn't phasing her the least. But I knew having a kid means you need silence and your neighbours definetely don't need to hear you kid screaming at random hours during the night (and, boy, did our kid scream a lot!).